bakerstreet | Memory, all alone in the moonlight. I can smile at the old days. I was beautiful then...

Memory, all alone in the moonlight. I can smile at the old days. I was beautiful then...

Tʜᴇ Mᴇᴍᴏʀʏ Sʜᴀʀɪɴɢ Mᴇᴍᴇ

1. Post your character! You may want to include a small summary or link containing information about what kind of memories your character may have to share.
2. Include content warnings for any characters with memories that may be triggering or otherwise upsetting.
3. Create a scenario using the lists below, or make your own!
4. Tag around and have fun!

ᴄʜᴏᴏsᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ

A. Warm Fuzzies - Fond memories of happy times. May or may not be bittersweet.
B. How Shameful - Embarrassing memories. Whoops! Hope no one ever finds out about this one...
C. Are We The Bad Guys? - Highly incriminating memories. Everyone makes mistakes, but yours might just be unforgivable.
D. Don't Cry - Tragic memories. Remember that really painful thing that happened and completely changed the course of your life? How could you forget?
E. How Dare You - Infuriating memories. Just thinking about it is going to make you mad again!
F. 2spooky - Jumpscares: The Memory. At least now you know why your friend is so scared of clowns.
G. Send Lewds - NSFW memories. But will it inspire a recreation, or just earn you a slap in the face?
H. Wildcard - Any memories not covered above, or a combination of a few!

ᴄʜᴏᴏsᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴇᴛʜᴏᴅ

1. Magic Mirror - Standing in front of the magic mirror, scenes of your past begin to play out right before your eyes! Do you try shattering it to make them stop? How are you going to explain what's being shown to the person next to you?
2. Sweet Dreams - It seems you've fallen into someone else's dream tonight, while they're taking a stroll down memory lane. Will you intervene to alter "history"? Or just watch as things play out?
3. A Picture's Worth - You've stumbled across a photo album containing photos of their past. Are they embarrassing childhood photos, or maybe something more? Or perhaps they're photos neither of you even knew existed.
4. Someone Else's Shoes - Not only are you seeing someone's past, you're living it! Have you taken the place of a bystander or acquaintance in a distant memory, or are you simply seeing through their eyes? Either way, time marches on, and you'll just have to watch as things play out.
5. Mutual Awareness - Be it through a magic spell or some other means, both of you have suddenly become aware of some secret from the other person's past. What will you do with this information?
6. Dear Diary - You found someone else's diary and just couldn't resist taking a look. But will you regret what you've found? Or maybe someone found yours, and now they know all your secrets.
7. Somebody Once Told Me - You've heard about someone's past through the grapevine, and now it's time to confront them over it! Or maybe you know someone else has been filled in, and you want to clear the air first.
8. Flashback Attack - Something happened that reminded you of your past, and for whatever reason, you feel compelled to share. Is it something serious? Or did that cloud just remind you of the time you fell on your ass at Disneyland?
9. Truth Serum - The literal kind, or just some social lubricant in the form of alcohol. Either way, you've taken something that's making you feel the need to open up about yourself, and maybe share something no one else knows about.
10. Wildcard - Have some other idea in mind, or want to combine any of the above? Pick this option!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

(This set up is everything to me. I'm pretty much down for any combination with the warning that her memories can include anything ranging from "scenes from a child assassin" to gnarly interrogation. Especially interested in scenarios where both people end up getting a peek at each other's memories.)

[so we definitely need another thread, right?]

(Listen, I was looking at your top level on this meme like "should we just double down and make this a pain lasagna?" So the answer is clearly yes. What kind of flavor are you thinking? I feel like some kind of dream space or magic spell thing would be the most likely, but I am intrigued by the mirror thing too.)

[Fuck yeah pain lasagna. I like the idea of a dream kind of vibe - I feel like they've gotta be at least a little bit trapped in the situation, they're both too practical not to just be like "fuck this mirror, let's drape a cloth over it and go be somewhere else"]

(Natasha would definitely very much be like "kind of want to destroy this but also I'm aware other people would probably want it, so...ugh." I'm so in for a dream vibe, though, maybe just spawned by something little like "both drank the same kind of tea" or "weird hand wave-y magic side effect." Would you like to start, or shall I whip up some glorious pain lasagna?)

[I've got like half a starter in my drafts. Was planning on sticking with soulmates AU, unless you've got anything else specific in mind?

(You are a delight, thank you! And that's perfect, because I'm picturing both of them like "goddamnit I was DELIBERATELY not trying to contextualize this.")

Really, they should have been braced for this one to go sideways on them from the start. No mission briefing containing the word artifact has ever led to anything good.

It starts off fairly simple. They're wrapping up a job near Vorbis when they get the regular update message from Earth, and on this particular occasion it comes with a request for them to drop by whenever they next get the chance to help sort through some alien tech recovered from the battlefield that no-one's been able to identify. It's not too far out of their way at that point, so they work a stop into their route and plan to take some downtime while they're there. He's honestly kind of looking forward to it. Earth is one of the better ports they have to take some shore leave on these days, and he's never gonna say no to an excuse to play around with some new tech.

Once they make planetfall, progress is pretty quick. A lot of the stuff isn't actually that exotic, just unusual for a chitauri ship and so unfamiliar to the small army of human techies who've been sorting through the wreckage left behind. There are a couple of real puzzles mixed in with it though, and that's more than enough to keep him interested. The others come and go as he works, some floating by in the background, others sticking around on a more consistent basis. Nebs gets bored fairly quickly and wanders off to find some trouble she can get in on. At one point Stark drops by, presumably also lured by the promise of weird alien tech: they end up spending most of the day arguing about music, and ultimately form a truce based around cornering Rhodey and dragging him out to a bar.

After a few days, he's down to mostly just the genuinely weird shit. Natasha's down working on it as well today, cross referencing the various reports that'd been submitted on the different pieces, as he squints contemplatively at a diagnostic screen hookup up to a large, stubbornly unidentifiable piece of machinery. "It's meant to scan for something," he mutters, breaking the companionable silence, "But I can't work out what." From the layout of the circuitry it looks like both panels are supposed to be activated simultaneously, but from the notes in the report it's clear that the first crew to check it out had already tried just having two people press them at the same time, so there must be more to it than that. He hums thoughtfully, considering the readout on the screen hooked up to it. "Might be able to figure somethin' out from it tryin' the scan, even if it's not gonna activate. Can you hit the other panel...?"

He's expecting an error message. He's hoping to get a brief glimpse of what kind of signal it is the machine's set up to look for, even if it shuts down again the second it doesn't see what it wants to. He's not prepared for it to light up like a fucking supernova the second Natasha touches the other side, and he instinctively tries to jerk his hand away but some force keeps it pressed flat against the panel, and—

—and suddenly there's nothing around them but a strange, clinging mist. Natasha is still there, but the machine and everything else around them is gone. A light catches his eye, and he looks down to find that a deep, faded scar on the outside of his right forearm is...glowing? As he stares at it, the mists part, revealing a hazy tableau of a crowded dive bar; for a moment he thinks the scene is frozen in place, but— no, things are moving, just very slowly. He turns, scanning for any hint as to what the fuck is going on, and finds himself abruptly face to face with...himself.

For a long few seconds, he can only blink, absolutely blindsided. The face looking back at him is younger, caught in the middle of a snarl, but there's no doubting that it's him. He takes a step back, trying to process what's in front of him, and the scene rapidly speeds up to a normal pace, the distant and oddly muffled sounds of a barfight kicking in. The ghostly younger version of him pivots to face a drunk Kree lunging in with a raised knife; unconsciously he touches the glowing scar as he watches his other self throw a defensive arm up, blocking a blow meant for his chest. There's a spray of blood as the blade bites deep, leaving behind a cut that perfectly matches it.

With that, the scene fades, mists enveloping them once more. "What the fuck," he mutters, soft and heartfelt. When he turns around, Natasha is at least still there. And coming from beneath her clothes, once again, there is a glow.

Natasha's been playing 'chase down black market alien tech' for long enough now that she's got a pretty good idea of what she's looking at on most days. Weapons in particular tend to be relatively easy to distinguish, and she can generally sort things by culture based on design even if she's not sure exactly what she's looking at. But this most recent haul is both sizeable and weird enough that it only makes sense to see if the experts are available. That, and even though she's absolutely terrible at giving herself a break, she's fairly certain the remaining Guardians wouldn't sit still if she never called them to Earth, so. Dual purpose.

She's comfortable in the quiet and in providing database management while Rocket's working on the biggest and arguably weirdest thing they found on the ship. Her ragtag team of tech enthusiasts have been placing bets on what it's going to turn out to be, and the entries are so far ranging that she can't even begin to make an educated guess of her own based on the aggregate data. So when he asks her to hit the other panel, she gives him a dubious look, but still sets the tablet down.

As a general rule, she tries not to touch mystery equipment. But she's pretty sure if it were going to explode, it already would have done so by now, so she slaps her palm onto it with a sigh that turns just as quickly into a grimace when the machine comes alive with a blinding light.

Her vision still feels a little washed out when the light fades, and her heart is hammering, but she's quick to move her hand the second it comes free. She turns her back to Rocket, a knife in one hand and one of her widow's bites in the other as her eyes skim the area. There's nothing. Darkness. Insidious fog. It's weirdly quiet, but she can hear the the soft muffled echo over her shoulder. So she reluctantly turns, watching as the bar fight plays out in front of them.

Well. This definitely counts as weird. She spares a quick glance at Rocket, and she can tell from his expression that was definitely a memory and not a - what? Shared hallucination? It looks like she's about to say something, but the mist clears, and her expression shutters to a studied blankness.

The space in front of them resolves into a sparse, industrial training room. The girls all look to be around thirteen or fourteen, wearing identical black jump suits. Young Natasha's hair is in a ragged, overgrown pixie that she recognizes. Madame had cut the remaining blue dye out of her hair when she was brought back after the mission in Ohio. She and another girl are fighting while Dreykov and two older widows watch.

Even this young, they're clearly both well trained. Neither of them are holding back and the blows they trade have a brutality to them that make it clear that this training session has stakes. A knife slash to her side nearly distracts her. But when young Natasha finally grapples the other girl and looks up, Dreykov nods. The same shuttered expression comes over her features as she hauls the other girl up and snaps her neck. It's absolutely silent for a moment. Dreykov approaches her younger self. His shadow falls over both of them. Natasha can feel how hard she's gripping the handle of her knife as the scene dissolves.

She can hear his voice echoing in her head. You're unbreakable. Like she's a prize. Just a thing. A finely honed weapon. "Do you have a scanner on you? Are we still physically at the compound or did that thing transport us somewhere?" They're practical, necessary questions. But her tone is so clipped that it's clear that she she doesn't want to find out if this thing has any more surprises stored in its circuitry.

Before they can do much more than exchange glances, the next scene resolves itself out of the haze. In the still moments before time catches up, he considers it with an uneasy fascination. The two girls both have the poised, deadly stance of trained fighters, their expressions blank other than a dreadful focus. As the scene lurches into motion, the sounds of clashing metal and grunts of effort filling the air. The fight is fast and brutal. The redhead with the shorter hair is, presumably, Natasha; it's a close-run thing, but she quickly gains the upper hand. The gristly crunch of snapping bone hangs in the air long after all else has faded to silence.

As the vision disappears again into nothing but swirling mist, his eyes are still fixed on where the older man had stood, a certain bitter recognition written across his face. The specifics might be different, the man himself might have been a stranger, but nonetheless there was something viscerally familiar in that dispassionate, assessing gaze. In the merciless satisfaction of someone contemplating the tool they've created and finding it, for now at least, sufficient. He swallows hard, expression twisting as though he's tasted something bitter, and shakes himself as Natasha's question pulls him back to the present.

"Nothin' in it was the kinda thing that could teleport." The answer is immediate, automatic, accompanied with a shake of his head. His eyes are distant as he mentally runs over what he'd seen of the inner workings of the machine, applying this new context to anything that hadn't had an obvious function. There had been some kind of extremely short-range field emitters. Too low-power to do any damage, which is precisely why he hadn't categorized them as a potential threat, but enough to induce some kind of shared trance state...? Maybe. It would've seemed like a fairly far-fetched conclusion thirty seconds ago, but under the circumstances, it's coming up the ranks as a working hypothesis.

He looks down, considering himself, and for the first time it sinks in that he isn't wearing what he had been before the machine activated; instead he's now in the armor-reinforced jumpsuit he guesses he thinks of as his default. The second he consciously realizes it, the mists waver and everything shifts disorientingly. Abruptly he's once again standing in the tank top and jeans he'd pulled on this morning before heading down to get to work. Well. That...raises some questions, but answers a few others.

"I think we're...dreaming, more or less," he says. "Guess the machine's for sharing memories? Dunno why it didn't activate for anyone else though."

The mists swirl, and once again the glow begins, this time permeating through the thin fabric of his shirt from low on his left flank. The scene revealed this time is a grimy alley in an industrial-looking area, a drizzling miasma of rain illuminated in pools by harsh streetlights. It's less of a surprise this time, seeing himself from another angle like an out of body experience. The other him doesn't look quite so much younger as before. He's supporting himself on the alley wall as he limps along, grimly determined, dressed in ill-fitting clothes with a solid week's worth of scruff on the edge of forming an actual beard.

As he drags himself into the shelter of some kind of loading bay tucked away under an overhang, sinking into a crouch on the dry concrete and starting to pull various supplies out of his pockets, the observing present-day Rocket suddenly barks out an incongruous laugh. "Oh, hey, it's the first time you got heartburn," he says dryly.

In front of them, past-Rocket has stripped off his shirt, revealing an angry and clearly infected gunshot wound in the same spot the glow is coming from, held shut by uneven, makeshift stitches. He's in the process of cleaning off a small knife, expression tightly resigned. It's a matter of two swift cuts to lay the stitches and the wounds underneath them open again. A fresh wave of blood comes coursing down his skin, carrying with it yellow-white puss and assorted other nastiness. His teeth are gritted, eyes wet and blinking rapidly, as he cleans the wounds out with the contents of a small glass bottle. Throughout the entire process he doesn't make a sound other than harsh, uneven breathing.

The scene fades again, lost to the mists, and he turns back to Natasha with a shrug. "I dunno if there's a way out from here. Guess we've just gotta keep moving. Not like there weren't plenty of folks around back in the real world though — they'll be lookin' for a way to shut it down."

Dreykov is dead and the Red Room has been dismantled. She'd at least accomplished that before everything went to shit. But that specter of him still has her on edge. The widow's bite is back in her pocket, but the knife is still in hand. She's deliberately not looking at Rocket as he answers her question. Even though her expression is still neutral, she doesn't want to risk the possibility of someone else seeing the ghosts in her eyes.

So she focuses instead on the content of his words, her mind turning over the possibilities as she distantly makes note of his shifting clothes out of the corner of her eye. Interesting. That could come in handy. Her head turns as the light in front of them shifts again, and she watches as a scruffy looking version of the man next to her resolves between the rain drops.

The scene is familiar, desperate and achingly lonely, and she does him the courtesy of not looking at his present self directly. Even if the corner of her mouth lilts into a smirk in recognition of his joke. Maybe people with less...active lives come here and see exactly that. A litany of every day maladies.

"They won't touch it until they're sure they won't kill us by pulling the plug," she answers, finally turning her head to look back at him. Which could take hours. "And it's the soulmate connection. That's why it didn't activate for anyone else." Her voice is dry and tired but there's still a hint of bleak amusement in the way she says it. His joke about the heartburn confirmed the thought that had already been half forming for her. If it was showing them each other's pain, what else could it be?

She wonders how this thing catalogs which hurts to show. All things considered, she doesn't have nearly as many scars as she should - just the ones she's accumulated post-Red Room, when she no longer had access to what the medical team had used to erase their injuries. But as the scene shifts and resolves again, she forgets about that entirely, taking a half step forward.

It's the interior of the safe house in Budapest, when she'd gone to find out why Yelena had sent the antidote to her. They're fighting their way through the apartment with a brutal efficiency, evenly matched and both unwilling to take the final blow to end it. Natasha knows that Yelena dissolved in the snap, because she would have found her by now, and seeing her like this hurts more acutely than any of the hits she'd taken in this fight.

It ends with both of them on the floor, curtain wrapped around each other's necks before her memory self speaks in Russian, naming the other woman as her sister and calling for a truce. The fabric slackens as the scene dissolves again. Natasha's jaw tightens as she swallows the lump in her throat. "That was my sister. Yelena. She's one of the Vanished." It's a sparse explanation, even for her, but she turns her head to look at him over her shoulder. As neutral as her expression is, there's no hiding the pain in her eyes.

He grimaces in acknowledgement. Yeah, they might be in this one for the long haul; if they're not in any immediately obvious physical danger back in the real world, chances are everyone else is gonna take a wait-and-see approach. There's no real point trying to anticipate it. They have no way of even knowing if time's passing the same kind of way for them as it is on the outside. It could have been a fraction of a second, or they could have been here for hours already.

He's heard stories about different means there are of positively identifying your soulmate, or confirming the link once you suspect. Most of them are less high tech, and on a lot of worlds, shrouded in tradition and ritual. It's not so uncommon for people to stumble across it like they did, but there are a lot of folks out there actively seeking it. He doesn't know how the fuck you figure it out if you and your soulmate are both the kind of folks who don't deal with anything more dramatic than sore backs and hangovers. Maybe that's why some of 'em go out there and build fucked up 'lets go over your lowlights reel' machines.

The next scene fades in, and he watches with interest as past-Natasha and a blonde woman he doesn't recognize fight through the hazy backdrop of an apartment. The physical pain isn't the kind that would have stuck in his memory, but it's not hard to pin down a rough timeframe; she doesn't look so much younger than she is now. She and the other woman have the same kind of training, that much is obvious from the way they fight, but... there's something different in it from the lethal sparring session the mists had shown them before. It's hard to pin down, but as he watches— yeah, there's a chance for a kill-shot passed up. And another. They're evenly matched, but neither of them are going all out. He doesn't understand the words Natasha eventually says, but the way the other woman stills is unmistakable, both of them cautiously relaxing in the moments before the vision fades out.

He's not particularly expecting an explanation, but as she speaks, he suddenly has even less idea what to do with the fact that he got one. He looks at her, surprised more than anything else that she's meeting his gaze, and fuck, the aching grief in her eyes is painful to witness. Worse, it's familiar. That sense of something never getting to become what it could have been, of a relationship that never had the chance to grow past all the baggage of how it began...yeah, that hits a nerve.

Almost as if provoked by the thought, the mists part in front of them to reveal a ship's hold, filled with a jeering crowd of brigands in red leathers. In the center of the ring of jostling bodies are two chairs, each with a prisoner tied to it. In the left, there's Rocket — younger again this time, somewhere in his twenties maybe — sporting a fairly magnificent black eye. The other holds an older man, dressed similarly to the rest of the crowd, with brilliantly blue skin and an open wound on the crown of his head showing sparking cybernetic ports. His expression is distant, grimly resigned. Past-Rocket, meanwhile, is smirking up at the ringleader standing over him, frozen in the act of drawing back for another punch.

Back in the present, Rocket ignores his younger self entirely, taking a step toward the older man tied to the other chair. “Been a while,” he says softly, searching the scarred, grizzled face in front of him as though committing it to memory. In a more conversational tone, aimed towards Natasha even if he doesn't turn his head, he adds: “He dies tomorrow. Woulda been me if things went down just a little different.”

The scene lurches into motion, the shouts of the crowd suddenly deafening as the ringleader’s raised fist smashes into the already bruised side of past-Rocket’s face with enough force to snap his entire head sideways. Distantly he watches himself shake his head sharply, whoop, and give a manic, bloodied grin as he launches straight back into taunting his captor. The language on his lips isn't one that's ever been spoken aloud on Earth, but the tone is unmistakable, calculated to infuriate. Some of the crew are laughing along; the smirk he gives earns him another brutal blow.

Someone who doesn't know him would probably miss the edge of desperation in the way he starts talking again whenever the crowd's focus starts to drift, keeping their attention on him; the way his eyes keep flickering sideways to a small cage holding a tiny, fragile-looking figure. The cage is visible through the crowd for only a moment before the whole tableau disintegrates again. Abruptly alone again, bereft of the shield of any distraction, his expression is an open wound.

Maybe there's a pattern to what the machine's showing them, or maybe it's feeding on the kind of emotion whatever came before provoked. Fuck, he kinda hopes it's not the latter. If they're about to get stuck in a loop of variations on a theme of loss, it's going to get bad real fast.

"...I had a kid," he says, barely audible, eyes still fixed on the spot where the cage had been. Not by blood, not even the same fucking species, but there's no point getting into that. "He got dusted too."

Even though she's not looking at the scene directly anymore, she's still acutely aware of where Yelena is laying on the floor. The way it dissolves is too close an echo to the way people had drifted into dust. She can still picture her exactly as she was when they went to Ohio, staging all those holiday photos. Too young to realize what was about to happen to her. That the next three years would be everything - safety and home cooked food and playing in the yard. And then back to the Red Room in a shipping container to continue having all of their edges honed to lethality.

Natasha's almost grateful for the way the lights shift, sparing them the indignity of trying to figure out how to talk about family. That is, until he moves around her to approach the scene. More closely than either of them have before. She wouldn't say she knows Rocket well, not yet - at least better than she had before the snap. But she knows people, and her eyes skim the scene, giving him a moment to drink in the proximity of people that are clearly important to him.

The power structure is fairly easy to trace around the ring. Even at a quick glance, she can see the places she'd apply pressure to get them to turn on each other. The blue skinned man clearly holds as much significance to Rocket as the tiny creature in the cage. It reminds her of the tree alien she'd seen during the battle in Wakanda, but at a much smaller scale.

Her eyes lift to look up at him when he indicates that the blue skinned man is going to die tomorrow, but even that knowledge seems to pale in comparison to the disappearance of that caged creature. The reason becomes apparent when he explains the connection. That alone is enough for Natasha to reorient her attention, to steel herself. Right. Spending a couple of hours like this is going to turn into a special kind of hell.

She moves over to stand next to Rocket again, the side of her hand brushing against his in a neutral, easy offering for connection. "Fuck Thanos." It's a quick sentiment, but she knows she wouldn't want some big speech right now. She's never been the speech type anyway. The scene shimmers, interestingly not resolving around them despite the fact that they'd moved forward, but the same distance away the others had been at the start.

The light that's shining on them now is blisteringly white, and Natasha feels a chill go down her spine. There's a ring of eight girls, around the age of sixteen, standing in the driving snow and wind. None of them are dressed for it. And there's a pack of supplies in the center of the circle. They're all eyeing each other warily, like they're waiting for someone to make the first move.

It's Natasha.

There have been scores of widows over the years, but she's the only surviving member of her class. Because Dreykov had tried something different with them. Subtly encouraged them to off each other. Pushing the boundaries of the constant testing. Making sure that there was no rest, no trust, no companionship to be found.

The fight looks exactly like what it is: a battle to be the sole survivor. To not die horribly of exposure in the Siberian wilderness where they'd been dropped off. Young Natasha is panting and bloody by the time she's the last one standing, clearly just managing to hold back tears as she opens the pack and dresses herself in the layers inside. The scene begins to fade as she turns and starts to brush the snow over the fallen girls in a makeshift burial.

"Okay," she says, resolved. She re-holsters her knife and pulls one of the widow's bites out and tosses it, watching with a resigned sigh as it just sort of...sparks harmlessly. "So much for hoping we could interrupt the electrical current."

He closes his eyes, breathing deep and steady, and forcibly pulls himself together. If he wants to have a fucking breakdown he can do it after they've dealt with this and there's not going to be an audience for it. He snorts a shadow of a laugh at the comment, giving a tired nod. "Fuck Thanos," he agrees. Sometimes he thinks the bastard got to die too fast. They should have dragged him out and made him deal with the consequences of his stupid fucking plan, like the rest of them have been doing ever since.

The ghost of that touch lingers on his skin long after it's gone.

The sudden icy white glare of light is so abrupt that he flinches, half expecting to see— but no, it's driving snow, howling through the air so intensely that he can almost feel the biting cold. After the other visions it's easy to pick out the younger Natasha from the ring of girls, a dreadful purpose in her eyes as she watches the others with all the merciless intent of a predator backed into a corner.

He already knows how it has to end. She wouldn't be standing here beside him now if she hadn't been the one to walk away. The brutality of the fight is no surprise; what catches him off guard is watching her, still shivering even in the thicker clothes, start to bury the others as best she can. In the pale light, suddenly she looks painfully young.

The vision fades. He watches the charge fizzle out into nothing and makes an absent, considering noise. "C'mon, let's try walkin' it," he says, picking a direction at random and gesturing off into the mists. "Worth seein' if we can find an edge or somethin'." Maybe everything will just reshape around them, but if there is any kind of boundary, it's worth finding. They're sure as hell not gonna get out by staying where it wants them.

So they walk. They pass other scenes as they go, most of them a litany of pain. He sees himself at what can't possibly be more than eighteen, dressed in a prison uniform, winning a brutal bare-knuckled scuffle by the skin of his teeth; unconscious and being pulled from the cockpit of a crashed ship by familiar figures he doesn't let his eyes linger on; pinned down in a firefight with blood coursing down his face from a wound at his hairline that's showing the glint of exposed metal. Some of them are surprisingly recent: at one point he sees Nebs popping a dislocated shoulder back in for him, which has to be that mission on Cyferios a few months back. If there's any pattern, he can't fathom it.

They learn quickly that ignoring them doesn't work. Any vision they don't acknowledge seems to follow them, fading in and out disorientingly until it begins to give the unnerving sense that they're going in circles. Some are worse than others. The memory of pain doesn't make much of an impression. For the most part old injuries are something he has no trouble being objective about, and he'd honestly forgotten where some of those scars came from. It's the glimpses of faces he'd resigned himself to never seeing again that sting.

It takes longer than he might have expected for the first memory of the lab to show up. The centerpiece of the scene that accretes out of the mists is a surgical table, surrounded by a team of purposeful figures in white lab coats. And laid out on it, ash pale and scared with the straps leaving red welts on his skin, is…

…is a child.

Rocket stops and stares, nearly as pale as the ghost strapped to the table. If he'd been asked, yeah, he guesses he knew he must have been pretty young when it all started. The way the implant scars are distorted where he's grown since they were installed is proof enough of that. But there's a difference between knowing that on an intellectual level, and being confronted with the sight of a fucking kid about to be cut open. As the scene picks up speed, the echoing sounds of businesslike chatter from the surgical team fill the air. One picks up a scalpel. Dread floods the pit of his stomach, hard and fast in an instant, as it draws blood and the first scream splits the air.

There's an energy field keeping the left arm immobilized while they work, filling the air with crawling blue sparks, but it ends just above the elbow: the kid on the table writhes against the straps holding him down, struggling futilely to pull away. Tears are streaming down his face. The surgical team appear indifferent.

Watching now from thirty years of hard road down the line, Rocket seems more embarrassed than anything else, shifting uncomfortably as he turns his back to the scene and keeps moving. At a particularly piercing scream, he winces. “Get it together, kid,” he mutters, half to himself. “There's worse comin’.”

As far as she's concerned, moving is better than staying still. Walking in search of a border at least gives both of them something to focus on instead of just the tableaus the machine is plucking out of their minds for them. So she shrugs and falls in step alongside him. It's weird to know that some of the worst things she's done won't appear here, because she'd been a very effective operative for the Red Room. The assassinations. The intel. The people she'd betrayed.

She remembers having a conversation with Steve after she dropped all of HYDRA's files on the internet, and her own service record along with it. He has a way of always seeing the best in others. And she knows he'd meant well by saying that she wasn't that person anymore. The fact of the matter is that she is always going to be that person, and she will reach into that toolkit when she has to. There's already so much red in her ledger. What's another page if she can spare someone else from cracking the spine on their own book?

There have been flashes of her from all over her timeline as they walk. But Rocket in the lab is the youngest she's seen him yet. Her eyes dart around the scene, taking in the casual, professional air of the adults in the room juxtaposed against the absolute fear on the boy's face. Dread might be flooding Rocket's stomach.

Natasha is furious.

She swallows it, all but actually bites her tongue. This is years in the past. But she's always been the most haunted by the things that happen to children. Her head turns when she hears him mutter, and the discomfort is written through every line of his body. She turns to stop him, her hand on his chest as she looks up at him, her expression thoughtful.

Something about the moment reminds her so strongly of Melina that for just a second, that sand washed air field in Cuba shimmers into focus behind her, the scene of her defending Yelena frozen in time as it just as quickly dissolves. "It doesn't matter if you were born in a cage or if a cage was built around you," she says finally, her voice low and measured. "It's not your fault. And it's not your fault that you survived it." Someone like Steve would have had a better speech on the fly - maybe something about not caring if he's pissed to hear it, that she'll say it again and again until it sinks in.

She doesn't think she'll have to. He's seen the evidence play out all around him in this damn...shared mind space. She knows exactly what it means to say that to him. Arriving at that conclusion about her own life has taken years, and there's still days that it's harder to swallow than others.

Something startled passes over his face as she stops him, almost as though he'd forgotten for a second that she was there with him. Behind him, the scene splinters like a cracked prism, flickering through a hundred other variations on the theme. He's even younger in some, on the cusp of adolescence in others; the faces looking down on him change over the years, but the air of professional detachment remains the same. In every one, there is blood. Exposed metal and bone. The screams and tears lessen gradually; by the time the boy on the surgical table is clearly in his teens, his eyes are blank and sightless, only the rapid wounded-animal rise and fall of his chest giving away that he's even still alive.

His expression is empty at first, uncomprehending, like he can't make sense of the words she's saying to him. At the phrase not your fault, he flinches.

He remembers what it was to be that terrified child — desperate to please, clinging to the dangled promise that if he did everything right, if he could just be better, there wouldn't be any more pain — and he hates it with every fiber of his fucking being. It smarts now to think that he was ever that stupid, that it took so much to teach him that lesson. It would be easier to live with if the only person who'd got hurt for it was him.

And with that thought, the mists shift again, a new scene forming around them. The lights that cut through them are cold white and harsh, bright enough to sting the eyes. In front of him, arrayed over Natasha's shoulders, are uniformed guards and lab staff, all in various stages of drawing and firing weapons.

Rocket freezes.

He doesn't need to turn around to know what he'll see if he looks behind him; twenty-five years later it's still burned into the backs of his retinas, burrowed deeper into his bones than any of the fucking implants. If he turns around he'll see himself, painfully young with a shaved head and fresh surgical scars blazing livid on his skin, holding a gun in his hand for the first time and finding that it fits there like it's part of him. And all around that kid's feet, there will be bodies.

The scene stays frozen. It's not going to let them move on until he looks.

His breath is going fast and shaky, a trace of desperation in the way he commits himself instead to studying the faces of the staff in front of him. The first people he killed. It'd all been over in a fraction of a second, back then; he hadn't had time to wonder if any of them were familiar, if he'd looked up at any of those faces from the surgical table. He doesn't even know which of them actually fired the shots that—

He closes his eyes, part of him distantly startled to feel tears spill down his cheeks. “I can't,” he whispers, shaking his head, back still stubbornly turned to the focus of the scene. “I can't—”

Though Natasha's eyes stay on Rocket, she can see the way that the scene behind him shatters. It strikes her as a peculiar type of cruelty that the way the light fragments in bursts of white would be beautiful if not for what she knows is happening behind him. Or for the way that it throws the pain on his face into sharp relief, like he's frozen in a moment of anguish still.

When the scenes finally stop shifting, she can tell that they're standing in the middle of one this time. It's a change from the way they'd had to approach them before, and the phrasing 'we're in the heart of it' strikes her. The double meaning is clear. The heart of the scene. The heart of his pain.

The expression on his face changes as the scene does, and she can take a guess at what's behind her without looking. Pursuit. These are the shadows that chase him in his dreams. Nightmares. And it's so quiet, so still that in that harsh light all she can think is like a morgue.

His past is medical. Scientific. Blood splattered screams on astringent clean surfaces. But she can recognize it the same way he saw something familiar in Dreykov's face. This is the way they forced him into a new shape.

There's no hesitation when his eyes close and the tears start to fall. The hand on his chest stays there, but she moves her other hand, the touch light as she slides her hand slowly across his shoulder and to the back of his neck. There's no pressure, no insistence to it - it's a simple offer that he can lean in to her if he wants to.

She knows instinctively that they'll be stuck here until he looks, but that's not particularly important to her. Look, is being trapped in a symphony of pain her favorite way to spend time? No. But it's what she deserves, what she's earned over the course of her blood soaked life. She can make her peace with being here. "Hey. You can do anything you put your mind to," she tells him, her voice low but certain. "But you don't have to. You get to decide what you do with what this thing is showing you. I don't care if we have to wait here with your eyes closed until Tony figures out how to disconnect it. But if you decide you want to look, whether it's to say goodbye or fuck you to the people behind me, it's because it's what you want to do."

She drops her hand from his chest and picks his up, placing it high on her own chest so he can feel the steady beat of her heart, the slow inhalation as she breathes in. "Start by just taking a breath with me. And then I'll move us to sit down if that's what you want to do." There's no pity or even really any concern in the way she says it - just that measured understanding of someone that's been in his shoes. Someone that knows that concern is the last thing he'd want in a moment like this.

There's something about a gentle touch against this backdrop that verges on utterly undoing. Tension shoots through him as he fights down the deeply embedded instinct to lash out like a wounded animal caught in a trap, to snap and snarl at anyone with the audacity to witness such a fundamental moment of weakness. Having lived through this once was bad enough, and a second time hurts, but someone else being here to see it just feels like an act of malice from the universe. They've shared pain all their lives, but pain is simply a fact of existence. This is...different.

He doesn't relax into the touch, but nor does he pull away. That alone is an effort of will.

The beat of her heart is steady under his palm. Measured. Nothing like the desperate pounding he can hear echoing in his ears, feel hammering against the cage of his ribs. He's dizzy with it, panic clawing its way up his throat as he struggles to breathe. But at that matter of fact offer he shakes his head sharply. The drive to keep fighting to survive is deeper than need, deeper than instinct, deeper than the grafted metal his bones have grown around. They need to keep moving and get the fuck out of here, and he refuses to be the reason that doesn't happen. It hurts, but he knows how to breathe through pain; it's humiliating, but since when does he get to have any kind of fucking dignity. He survived this once and he'll do it again. They're going to get out of here. And then he's going to go out there and find whoever thought it was a good idea to build this fucking nightmare machine, and give them a few memories of their own they'll flinch from having anyone else see.

There's a brutal, hard-learned abruptness to the way he forces himself back to an even keel, gritting his teeth and seeming almost to stop breathing for a few long moments before he raises his chin sharply, squares his shoulders, and takes in a slow, shuddering breath. His eyes are red-rimmed and wet when he blinks them open, but there's a glint of grim determination in the depths. "I'm good," he says, voice rough, and— well, it's not true exactly, but it's not a lie either. He can keep going. He'll live. What more can you really ask for.

His fingertips press in slightly more firmly against her skin for a moment — not quite gratitude but more than acknowledgement — before he pulls away, braces himself with a grimace, and turns to look himself in the eye.

He'd known what he expected to see, but it still takes him aback how young the face looking back at him is; fifteen, maybe sixteen at a push. At his feet is an adult man, stirring weakly in a spreading pool of blood. Behind him are three other kids, all in the same thin, scrub-like uniforms. One is already down; the other two are poised to flee with panic in their eyes. The smaller of the two, a girl with albino coloring and a cage of metal around her face, is frozen in the act of reaching out to try and grab his arm. There's a spark of vicious triumph in the kid's eyes despite the fresh tear tracks cutting down his cheeks, the sudden power of fighting back for the first time in his miserable life. It won't last more than a moment. In a few seconds he's going to turn around and see what it cost.

All he had to do was run. Why couldn't he just have fucking run.

Inevitably, the scene unfreezes. The hail of shots in both directions passes through them, ghostlike, without so much as a whisper of sensation. Behind him he hears the muted thump of bodies hitting the ground. Three shots; three clean, immediate kills. Not bad for someone who'd never touched a weapon before that moment. There's no fucking denying they did a good job making him into what he is, is there.

If there's one mercy in all of this, it's that from this vantage he doesn't have to see the look on his younger self's face as he turns and sees the others lying still and limp on the ground. It's painful enough to witness the sudden defensive drawing up of his shoulders, the shaky half-step back he takes. From somewhere beyond the edges of the scene there's the distant, echoing sound of shouting, of many pairs of booted feet pounding against the metal flooring. The kid hesitates a second longer before breaking and turning to run, the crack of gunfire roaring through the mists in the endless moment before the scene fades out.

Natasha hadn't really expected the careful touch to ground him. It had been more of a reminder - or a counterpoint, maybe. A different external stimuli that's not leering at him from his past. Truth be told, she's pretty sure that telling him to get his shit together and face things head on probably would have been more effective. But that's not the point. Life isn't always about being effective. Sometimes offering someone an out, even thinking they won't take it, is the right thing to do.

The way he pulls himself together looks like it's probably the physical manifestation of his force of will. Like scrap parts welded together to keep a car moving over the finish line. That I'm good is absolute bullshit, but she knows it's what he needs to be to get through this. She's not going to contest it. instead she just gives him a nod as his fingertips press against her. Her own hands fall away easily, without resistance as he turns.

It seems cruel, the fact that she has to look too for the scene to resolve itself. Some pain should be private. Whatever cosmic force decided that joining people together by the way they hurt had a pretty optimistic consideration of the kind of pain people would find themselves in.

Rocket and the other kids are so young. They look younger under the white lights, younger because of that terrified recognition that they're in the middle of a fight or flight situation. The gunfire is ugly. It paints the world red and black. Rocket's younger self runs - towards safety, away from the scene around them - both, maybe. There's a desperation in his footsteps. They're left with bodies.

In some ways, Natasha feels like she's always being left with bodies. She's not sure that the dark and mist that creeps back in around them is any better. There's nothing she can say that will help him cope with what he just had to re-live. So instead, she says, "I'm sorry this place wouldn't let that be private for you."

It's still dark. She doesn't know if it's to give time for processing, or if the machine is trying to find the thing in her psyche that holds equal weight. "Maybe we broke it," she remarks dryly.

All wounds scar over in time. This little trip down memory lane has been reminder enough of that. Anything that doesn't kill you has to heal as best it can eventually. But sometimes as best it can is still a hurt you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. His right knee still aches when it's cold; there's a couple fingers on his left hand that've been broken and reset too many times and don't quite bend like the others any more; and for as long as he lives he's going to have to carry the knowledge that if in that moment he'd valued the promise of freedom just a little more than a chance at revenge, the others might have made it out of there alive.

A muscle jumps in his jaw, teeth gritted tight enough to creak. "...yeah," he says. What else is there to say, really, when you've just had the absolute worst moment of your life cracked open against your will for someone else to see. Someone who didn't want to fucking see it any more than you wanted to have it shown.

He's still breathing like the walking wounded as the mists close in again, every inhale a shuddering effort of will. But in the wake of it, there's something almost like relief. There's nothing left that's worse than that. There are other people he's lost, other times where he winces to recall just how bad he fucked up, but there's never been anything else as deeply and fundamentally his fault. If he made it through having that shoved in his face again he can make it through fucking anything.

"Here's hoping," he replies, attempting a casual shrug that still comes out somewhat stiff and jerky. Even as he says it, the knot of dread in the pit of his stomach is tightening again. There's no way that was it. It certainly had the feel of a crescendo, but...well, he's not the only one stuck in here, is he.

His jaw is clenched so tight that she won't be surprised if he breaks a tooth. Between that and the labored breathing, she's pretty sure he's doing the equivalent of patching the internal wounds over with duct tape. Making sure everything stays in place long enough to keep him moving until he has the privacy needed to really deal with this shit. There's nothing she can do to make it better. The only way out is through.

The only way out is always through.

Even so, she gives him a quick upward nod of acknowledgment. Like she's saying 'I'm here. This sucks. Nothing could make this better. But we're both still here.' The mists start to take shape around them again and she steels herself for it. His wave just crashed all around him. She knows that means that it's her turn.

One of her brows arches. They're back in Siberia as she finishes her hasty burial, frostbitten fingers inside of too large gloves. The scene splinters, and she's nine or ten, breaking her own finger while a severe looking woman watches with grim determination. Another crack and she's even younger, blindfolded, meticulously disassembling a gun.

The scene seems to freeze for a moment there and Natasha crosses her arms. From the look on her face, it's clear that she's not entirely sure what the point of this is. There had been no physical pain in that memory. Even reassembling the gun had been easy for her. The Red Room's version of a Rubik's cube.

Everything sort of - shudders around them. It reminds her of Wanda's power, that time that she'd put her in some kind of trance that had taken her back to the Red Room. And as soon as she thinks of it, they're inside that memory, like some kind of fucked up nesting doll. These scenes jump quickly back and forth - girls dancing en pointe, Natasha firing at a target, the gun dropping between hands as the target switches to a man with a bag over his head, and then a hand pushing her down on a gurney.

The darkness and fog is back again for just a moment. A heartbeat. It seems like the machine has finally decided what to do with her pain, and she watches as it shifts back to her actual memory of shooting that anonymous man for nothing more than a training exercise.

This is, of course, the heart of her pain. And the heart of her pain was never going to be physical. It's etched into her bones, in the fiber of her being. They're treated to a parade of all the times she didn't face a physical consequence for her actions -

There she is, strangling a mid-level politician with a garrote in his garage. And there, undercover at a lavish party where she poisons half the attendees with a remarkable ease. There are accomplishments without immediate death too, of course - all the times she'd ferreted every secret from a person or organization or government office and left them in shambles. There's the hospital fire. And Antonia's young face in the window as she gives Clint the order to blow up the building.

There's no pain she could ever feel that could amount to the pain she's caused other people.

Her arms are still crossed, her fingertips pressing hard into the underside of her arm. Her tongue sweeps along the inside of her lower lip, a clear effort to keep herself from clenching her jaw the way he'd been not too long ago. The scenes are still going, building a web of death and deceit around them. And all along every thread, the Black Widow.

'I got red in my ledger,' says some version of her to their left. 'I want to wipe it out,' comes the second half of the sentence to their right.

And then, just in front of Rocket, Natasha from not long ago - her hair cropped short and dyed blonde - raising a gun to fire through Rocket and take down the memory of the government agent between them. The dark and fog return as he falls.

It's quiet for a moment. Quiet like a morgue. Because of the work she does now, people forget that this will always be who she is. A knife in the dark. A finely honed instrument designed to pick apart the seams of the world and reshape it.

Her eyes are wet, and she lets out a snort that's not quite laugh. More like a sound of disbelief. "I know there's nothing I can do to wipe out the red," she says, apparently addressing the machine - she's staring off into the fog somewhere, not looking at Rocket. "Trying anyway is better than the alternative."

There's no helping the way the tension flows out of him as the mist swirls again and the machine's focus shifts back to her, bringing them to that same blizzard-scoured plain from before. Sure it's not fair, but apparently that's the name of the game today, and he'll take a moment to catch his breath and think about anything other than his own baggage at just about any price right now. Maybe if he was a different kind of person, he'd feel a little bad about that.

Maybe if he was a different kind of person he'd be something other than fascinated by what he sees.

He's seen her fight. He knows she's good at what she does. But there's something different in this, something he can't quite pin down. She's younger in most of them, though rarely a child; not much they're seeing looks recent. If there's a logic to the way it flickers through different moments, he can't see it. Most of it looks...businesslike. Mundane, almost, if you live a certain very specific kind of life.

It's only when he catches a glimpse of her face in the here and now, illuminated by phantom firelight, that suddenly he's struck by what the common thread is with his vision. It's guilt. And with that, quick on its heels is the realization what what he's missing is context. It's the why of it. And looking at her now...yeah, he gets the feeling that if there ever was a why to any of this beyond those were my orders, it wasn't good enough.

He can't help but flinch as the illusory version of her points her gun straight at him, clamping down on an aborted instinctive move to try and grab for the barrel in the split second before she fires. The bullet passes straight through him, of course. It was only ever there to fuck with them, just like everything else in this maze of fucking nightmares.

The silence that draws out in the wake of her quiet response is close and heavy. He's suddenly and painfully reminded of Gamora back when they'd all first met, grimly ready to die if that was what it took to undo some of what she'd helped make happen as the weapon her father forged her into.

"Hey, fuck that!" He takes a few steps into the mists, addressing a point somewhere above them with furious indignation. "What the fuck kinda trade-off is that? I get to skate right on by the you're a shitty person highlight reel and she doesn't?" For just a moment the mist seems to shiver around him, half-formed ghostly images flickering into being for half a heartbeat before vanishing again. Him grinning like a demon with someone else's blood dripping down his chin; distant screams ringing out over the crack of an explosion as he pops a detonator; his lips moving silently — I live for the little things: like how much this is gonna hurt — as he sights down the length of a gun. None of them manage to hold their form for more than a moment.

He spits on the ground and jabs a threatening finger skyward. "Fuck you. I'm gonna get out of here and I'm gonna break you down for scrap. Your processor core's going straight into the nearest star, you hear me?" He shakes his head, eyes ablaze as he turns sharply back toward Natasha. "This thing—"

And then suddenly he's staggering back from the machine, static prickling over his newly-freed palm as the light from the panel fades with a descending hum of circuits powering down. The air is full of relieved chatter and a few scattered cheers. He shakes his head again, blinking rapidly as he desperately tries to orient himself. They're surrounded by what looks like the entire technical staff; there's Banner, hovering with an oversized data readout in hand, Stark kneeling by the open panel of the machine...

"What the fuck," he says, with feeling.

The why would never be good enough. There's plenty of people she's either killed or hurt with her actions over the years that have probably deserved it. But when she was with the Red Room, even more of them didn't. They paid the price for working against Dreykov, for having something he wanted. They paid it in fire. They paid it in blood.

She's still lost in thought as the quiet darkness unfolds around them. It's not something he'd be able to see, but this absence in the wake of her life on display feels like part of it too. She'd escaped the Red Room. Carved out a better life for herself. Made good use of the skills she has for better or worse. And she'd done it at the expense of every other woman and girl that the Red Room had chewed up and spat out. She'd done it to her own sister.

Thinking she'd succeeding in killing Dreykov had only ever been a lie she told herself so she could sleep at night.

She'll always be this - woman and weapon. Natasha and Black Widow superimposed over each other. Coexisting in the same skin. Granted, there are other truths there too. The good work she's done. The people who she's saved or changed for the better. But those truths are harder to see in the shadow of the spider's web.

Her reverie is only broken when his voice rings out in the silence, and her eyes turn back to Rocket as she makes her expression relax into something more neutral. What he's doing is clear, but she only has a beat to process it before reality snaps back into focus around them. She inhales sharply as she takes a step back, shaking her hand out as her eyes flick between Rocket and Bruce, then land on Tony.

The relief and chattering and questioning is cut short when Natasha turns toward Tony. For just a second, it looks like she's going to attack him. He even grabs her wrist. And she turns with it, flipping his arm out of the way so she can grab a pen from the inside pocket of the jacket he's wearing.

She lets him go and turns her back to him as she clicks the pen. It whirs and clicks as it resolves, forming an armored glove around her hand with a repulsor in the palm. That same businesslike look is back on her face as she lifts her hand and fires it directly at the panel Rocket had been tinkering with before the machine had pulled them in.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Memory, all alone in the moonlight. I can smile at the old days. I was beautiful then...

Tʜᴇ Mᴇᴍᴏʀʏ Sʜᴀʀɪɴɢ Mᴇᴍᴇ

ᴄʜᴏᴏsᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ

ᴄʜᴏᴏsᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴇᴛʜᴏᴅ

natasha romanoff | mcu | ota

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